All My Facebook Friends Have Babies

This is actually a drag queen.
But I think you get my point.

There seems to be a fundamental difference in how Californians and the East Coast think about age; in that,  Californians don't.  Or they don't want to.  They seem to ignore it, and if that doesn't work, they fight it tooth and nail.  I see countless women with white roots preceding black hair, eyebrows up to the sky, and I pray that I have the sense to age gracefully.

My male coworkers are no better.  My co-teacher is in his early thirties and still essentially balancing a series of part-time jobs.  He chases women in an indiscriminate, desperate way and smokes up on campus like a 17 year old kid.  Next door, the mid-forties P.E. teacher is just as bad.  Never married, no kids, and still waiting for his 'big break' into the music business.  He parties most nights of the week.

When I sit in Starbucks middle-aged men try to flirt with me as if they are somehow not privy to the raging age difference.  After I get over my initial sense of disgust, I am plagued by the idea that, in the South, he could be my father.

That being said, I think the South ages too fast.  When I studied abroad I met three lovely young ladies from that part of the U.S..  All of them were married by graduation.  Being from Virginia, which is pseudo-South, my facebook is overrun by spouses and babies.  In graduate school I felt like my youth was slowly being sucked out of me.  Business casual ruled my wardrobe and I started befriending forty-year old women and tittering about their daughters' new boyfriends.  Kids these days!

I've never actually seen "Father Knows Best"

So when I left Virginia, it felt like I was fleeing.  Escaping.  Escaping the slow suck of suburbia which would have me settled and domestic in the next couple of years.  It would be all too easy for me.  I love cats.  I love kids.  I love love.  It would start simply enough.  I'd get a nice teaching job in a nice suburban neighborhood (maybe even where I grew up, the county loves to hire old students).  With my nice teaching salary, I would get a nice one-bedroom apartment.  Soon I'd get a nice cat and meet a nice male teacher and we'd have nice kids in a nice house with a nice yard.  And even though at first I told myself I'd move to California eventually, I'd suddenly find myself comfy.  Domestic.  With a family.  A family and this small, nagging feeling that I'd missed something.

So when I got to California I welcomed this break from the suburban suck.  This extended youth.  it sounded like possibilities.  Opportunities.  I've always been hyper-mature and missed out on a lot of the tom-foolery (yes, I just used tom-foolery, deal with it) of high school and college.  A few more years to mess around would be great.

Bitterly divorced, I say!

But I'm still a pseudo-Southerner at heart.  And God, I'm petrified of being in my mid-forties, no career, no husband, no kids.  To still be working odd-jobs.  To have never been with someone I wanted to start a family with.  To have no family.  I told this to Andy awhile back and he kind of shrugged me off.  He doesn't plan the way I do.  He's good at seeing where he is and what makes sense for then.  I'm good at seeing where I want to go.  And where I could go.  And just as easily as I could have settled too soon, I feel like I could not settle at all.


And then I worry that this fear would lead me to rush into something that doesn't fit.  And instead of being never married when I'm in my mid-forties, I'll be bitterly divorced.

So anyway.  There has to be a balance.  And I hope as I grow up I have enough sense to find it.

~<3~

This post was inspired by seeing multiple middle-aged women with black hair and white roots.  At least have the sense to pick a lighter color, it will make you look less desperate.  That being said, nothing (save dying young) will prevent me from being an old lady with a pink hair.

Or from being a member of the red-hat society.
Which I have always perceived as a mature-lady version of Girl Scouts.  If this is not true, I will be devastated.